Reading a Letter

Held in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to circa 1688, Reading a Letter is a horizontal o-oban sumizuri-e print that captures an intimate moment of correspondence within the Genroku-era domestic and floating-world idiom that the Hishikawa school had pioneered. The letter-reading motif (fumi-yomi) was a recurring subject in late seventeenth-century ukiyo-e, addressing the literate culture of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter and the broader urban world in which written communication carried emotional and erotic weight. Moroshige's composition employs the dense patterning of kimono surfaces and the confident, fluid linework that characterized Hishikawa Moronobu's late single-sheet prints, demonstrating Moroshige's secure command of his master's pictorial vocabulary. Printed in single-block black ink on the o-oban yoko-e sheet format that the Hishikawa school favored for genre subjects, the work predates the introduction of multi-block color printing by nearly seventy years and exemplifies the foundational sumizuri-e idiom of late seventeenth-century Edo ukiyo-e. The Art Institute of Chicago's Clarence Buckingham Collection example, measuring 27.4 by 38.8 centimeters, situates Moroshige within the immediate generation of Moronobu's pupils whose work consolidated single-sheet ukiyo-e as a distinct commercial and artistic medium during the Genroku cultural high point.